Reality Check: Readers’ Responses

Editor’s Note: The following is just a sample of the bevy of Reality Check reader responses we received this week in the wake of the 2016 presidential election results. We may have to dedicate two weeks to the overwhelming stream of comments.

James,

I’m very proud of you for admitting you were wrong and would expect no less from you because, regardless of what you write or how contentious some topics may be (and whether or not I agree with you) you are ALWAYS a man of integrity. (PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP—AN EXPLANATION IN TWO PARTS—Issue: 11/16/16) And I’m equally impressed—and glad—that you gave Bill Roberts space in your column this week to give his take. It’s quite brilliant and even though I’m not a political person and do not even remotely study things like polls, I suspected (hoped) that what happened might actually happen. I felt that the media was missing some obvious signs that I couldn’t really even put my finger on now… Even though you focused on the low educated white man, Bill’s point about the shy Trump voter makes more sense. Because no way only low educated white men voted for him. And for the first time in a long time it seems that people who would normally vote Democrat finally started looking at what the Democrats have actually done for them economically. I’m thinking of Brunell Donald-Kyei, an attorney and Vice Chairwoman for the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, in particular…

—Elizabeth Vengen, esq.

I do believe, unfortunately, that all those women that are Trump supporters are ridden with generations and generations of woman’s repression passed down. Women are mean to one another (culturally speaking—through years and years of being taught to compete with one another—you need to be wanted, what does she have that I don’t, etc.) so they fucking did that to Hillary. Make themselves feel independent. Oh, look at me, I’m not voting for her just because she’s a woman. It only shows how much further we have (as a sex) to go. This shit is deep-rooted. Deep! We MUST have each generation of women become stronger. And united. And educated. That’s just one issue of many !!!!!!!!!

—Cheryl Buono

Donald Trump is a scab left over from a 30+ year old wound which would have healed long ago into an honorable scar, but we still can’t stop scratching it.

—Brad Morrison

I giggled when I saw the results. I was also shocked how women, any of them, could have voted for him. Walk into a bathroom while teenage girls are changing clothes? Try that shit with your daughter in a few years and see how far that gets you. Only Trump could get away with it, I suppose. And the Mexico wall. Are his sociopathic peers really going to let him cut off the badly needed supply of slave labor that this country still needs to do stuff like… rake leaves? Are the dreamers ready for $8 chicken breasts waiting for them in the supermarket when “real Americans” start getting paid to do the DDD work (“dirty, dangerous, dull”)?

Maybe I’ll be spectacularly wrong, as you were, but I don’t see someone used to getting his way, and ONLY his way, dealing well with the endless compromises and dilution of ideas that make up the standard working environment of government process. Perhaps he’ll get some legislation passed that will be friendly to Manhattan-based real estate firms that rhyme with “hump”. I give him a year, then it’s non-stop golf and tending to his businesses in whatever manner his well-oiled legal machinery advises him to.

—Doc Slater

The election WAS rigged, and we’re wrong not to be absolutely furious. Michael Moore & others as well as the plain, obvious facts warned the DNC (and the Republicans) that they were grossly underestimating anti-Establishment rage. Yet 300 or so “superdelegates” (we see the wisdom of those quite clearly now, don’t we?) committed to Hillary before a single primary vote was even cast. The DNC ignored every change in the wind and went with the most Establishment candidate they could have chosen to carry their banner—O’Malley would have done better. They stacked the deck against Sanders even though poll after poll after poll showed he matched up much better against Trump and, bizarre as it seems—though some journalists pointed it out, and were duly ignored—many Sanders supporters switched to Trump after Sanders was out (two words: anti-Establishment rage).

Even after that rage swept Trump into the nomination, ahead of 16 seasoned, well-backed, long-time politicians, the DNC ignored it. Sanders kept his word & stumped for Hillary, but HRC slapped Sanders supporters in the face by hiring D. W. Schultz an hour after she was forced to resign & slapped them again by saying they’re unemployed Millennials who live in their parents’ basement. I don’t fit that description. The Sanders supporters I personally know don’t fit that description. The worried African-American father I met at the polls yesterday doesn’t fit that description.

She ran an idiotic campaign of attacking Trump as “unfit,” which was preaching to the choir on the blue side and not reaching Trump voters on the red. She gave people something to vote against, but they weren’t convinced (a woman in my bldg who voted for Obama twice voted Trump). She gave them nothing to vote for (I don’t mean blue voters, but we’re the choir; she had to attract independents, Millennials, the disillusioned). Discussion of the issues ended with her victory in the primaries. I warned on my FB page about a month ago she was losing the election, not because Sandernistas refused to support her but all by herself … by not distinguishing her policies from Trump’s. I was attacked for misogyny & supporting the buffoon we now have to call Mr. President, as if I would ever vote for him.

My one hope is that the DNC dismantles the superdelegate system, which doesn’t work for an obvious reason: it doesn’t gauge voter support, and voters decide elections, not superdelegates. They also have to allow independents to vote in their primaries in all states because, again, Democratic voters don’t decide elections; all of us do. Yes, the election was very much rigged, by HRC and the DNC, only they rigged against themselves.

—Vincent Czyz

Invisible man in the sky help us!

On the plus side; we’ll have four years of amazing comedy material.
—Bo Blaze